Reconciliation (Part 2)

This blog post is a continuation of the reflections I started last week after attending a conference called “Racial reconciliation and discipleship in the missionary church.”

As disciples of Jesus Christ, we promise to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.  Our cultural context has fallen quite short of tenet.  My England ancestors established a strict understanding of social standing from royalty to the commoner, with the royals holding all the prestige and privilege.  Those standards were exported with English expansion around the world and imposed on people and places that had much different world views or approaches to living. Whether by force, coercion or subterfuge, the European standards for social standing became the standard in many places, including the United States.

As a result of this influence, those who were forcibly brought to the United States as indentured servants and slaves were treated as less worthy than their fellow inhabitants.  Those who lived in this land already were judged as heathens because they lived so differently from the European understanding of “civility.”  They, too, were considered “less than” and in need of “saving.”  For all their claims of enlightenment, my ancestors did not understand the beauty of the other cultures they encountered and judged them to be wanting.  Such prejudice is woven into the foundation of our republic, as it was formed to empower white men who owned land.  

I do believe our “Founding Fathers” were faithful men and were able to justify not “loving their neighbor as themselves” because they did not see them as their equal, not their “neighbor.” This is the origin of the sin of racism.  Of course, I whole-heartedly disagree with the premise that any human is “less than” another, but the damage has been done, and we left to deal with the consequences to those beliefs.

While some might see these truths to be ancient history, the reality is that that history and how it has influenced the laws, actions and reactions of all who live in this country has caused deep rifts in our society.  Some believe those rifts will never be healed. Others have dedicated their lives to working toward reconciliation with each other and with our God.

Reconciliation starts with being honest about the circumstances.  If we cannot agree with how we got here, we are never going to agree on how to be reconciled. This demands that we are in relationship with the “other,” whomever that might be.  Some may argue that we cannot be held accountable for what our ancestors did or did not do. For myself, I believe that I have inherited privileges from my ancestors and others have been denied the same because of theirs.  As such, there is work to be done to reconcile how we deal with our history faithful and how it influences us today.

Yes, this is a painstaking, time-consuming enterprise, but if we don’t start somewhere, we are falling short of Jesus’s command to love one another as he loves us.  We need to be brave to have those difficult conversations and seek right relationship.  I need to be ready to be transformed by the other, learning from those whose experience of this country is much different from my own.

I hope we can have some of those conversations after our trip to the Smithsonian.  I hope our shared experience will allow us to be honest with each other, especially when it is painful.  I pray that all our hearts may be transformed, and we can experience reconciliation in a new and powerful way.

In Christ,

Rev. Valerie+